Re: design update



Charlie,

On Tue, 2004-02-10 at 15:24, Charles Goodwin wrote:
> My design: http://www.charlietech.com/goffice

Some comments on your design - basically it's pretty good but I've got a
few quibbles...

s/Abiword/AbiWord/g

Drop the doctype from XHTML 1.1 to XHTML 1.0 Strict.  According to the
standards [1] XHTML 1.1 must be served as application/xhtml+xml and MSIE
won't render it if you do.  XHTML 1.0 can be served as text/html which
all browsers will be happy with.

Stop messing with my font sizes.  I've got my default font set to a size
that I like, and you shouldn't be changing it - if the text looks to big
on your browser with font-size: medium then you need to change this in
your browser settings, not on the page design.  Incidentally, if you are
setting absolute font sizes you should be points not pixels - the latter
vary with the type of user agent being used.  When I override your font
sizes so that my eyes stop bleeding, the blue background of #nav and
#mainlinks divs flows into the top of the h3 elements.  Setting a single
colour background will fix this and subtract almost nothing from the
design.

The AbiWord/Gnumeric/Planner icons should all have alt="" since the
application name is in the heading next to them.  The screenshots are
way too small to be any use - either get rid of them or make them links
to full size images.

I'm pretty sure having the search box at the bottom of the page is
against usability guidelines (it's best to make sure it's visible when
the page is first loaded - I'll see if I can dig out a URL for this). 
I'd suggest either putting it in the header or adding another section on
the right for it, above the 'GO Users' section.

I don't think the User Portal/Applications/Community/etc. headings
should be links.  What would they be pointing to?  Also I assume that
this page is the 'About GO' one, in which case that shouldn't be a link.

The valid XHTML/CSS icons don't work with the rest of the design and
only impress geeks like me - most people don't care about this sort of
thing.  If you want to keep the links to the validators then I suggest
you swap them for text-only links - much more subtle.  And you really
shouldn't have them if your page doesn't validate :)

The black -> red rollovers on links is yuck.  I can't believe you could
do this after criticising my yellow backgrounds :)

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/2002/NOTE-xhtml-media-types-20020801/

- olly

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